Friday, 02 December 2005

In a previous post I referred to the document approved by EQUAL "Rankings-Guide for the media" and given some subsequent commentaries by Della Bradshaw perhaps further clarifications are needed.

EQUAL is a consortium that comprises quality assessment and accreditation agencies in the field of management education as well as national or regional associations of universities, business schools or graduates in Business Administration. It currently has 21 membersrepresenting different continents and aims at attracting even more partners in the future. Its membership’s composition and profile goes far beyond the mere representation of business schools and so does its mission.

As Chairman of EQUAL, one of my goals is to transform the consortium into a wide and legitimate body representing the major stakeholders of management education. We are approaching, for example, students', professors' and employers' associations. The recent posts by Della Bradshaw make me think that we may have missed the opportunity of inviting another major stakeholder group: the specialised media in business education. Would their representatives be interested in becoming members of EQUAL in the future?

The aforementioned document was prepared and published six years ago and has been available since at EFMD’s website. To put things in context, it was a response to an alarming proliferation at that time of rankings that were spurious in terms of methodology, transparency, authorship and unsolicited information. As far as I know, the document was distributed in different countries through the respective members of EQUAL but, unfortunately, it seems that it did not reach many of its intended targets: bad marketing indeed by EQUAL. Well, better late than never.

Having said this, according to my interpretation, the rankings produced by the major international newspapers and magazines today –BusinessWeek, Financial Times, Forbes and The Economist- fulfil the basic requirements stated in the document. The virtue of the document is that it allows to distinguish those rankings that respect the basic principles of transparency, consistency and impartiality from those that don’t. Can the document serve as a reference for the rules to be observed in ranking activities?

Wednesday, 30 November 2005

Business schools rankings, if conducted according to the basic principles of impartiality, transparency and consistency, add real value to the market. In the past years, many new ranking schemes have entered the scene, evidence that the market demands them. Different stakeholders –prospective students, recruiters and corporate clients- see rankings as additional criteria to gather further information and make the educational offerings more easily comparable. It is thus legitimate that an initiative that provides value to the market has its returns and becomes profitable for those who undertake such effort. I have no objections here. I appreciate the positive attitude of those ranking producers who contribute to the transparency of the activity by engaging in a constructive debate with representatives of the institutions examined.

Certainly, rankings are here to stay and will probably proliferate in the future. Once European higher education systems in Europe adopt the same structure and cross border movement of students increases, applicants to a diverse set of disciplines will need to compare many different elements and will use rankings as an instrument to decide where to study. The recent flourish of worldwide university rankings anticipates and evidences this.

As Dean Thomas and Della Bradshaw point out, accreditation agencies such as EQUIS, AMBA and AACSB do not endorse rankings and I believe it’s not their job to make their own rankings. They can, however, contribute by providing guidelines or recommendations that make the activity more transparent and reliable. For example, EQUAL, the think tank for EQUIS, published a document with the requirements that, according to the business education community, rankings should desirably meet. An interesting exercise would be to evaluate the existing league tables according to those guidelines. How many of them actually pass the test?

Sunday, 27 November 2005

One of the frequent criticisms against rankings is that they compare institutions that are intrinsically different. How can you compare, for example, a Chinese executive education centre run by practitioners with an American university-based business school composed of academics that produce scientific research? These two hypothetical institutions may both offer MBA programmes, but their location, mission, faculty profile and research output vary essentially and are thus not comparable. The basis of this criticism is the incommensurability argument: different values or things of a different genre cannot be weighted according to the same scale; you cannot compare apples to pears.